The Senate Commerce Committee will hold yet another hearing today (7/27/10) at 2:30pm Eastern with two panels:

• Witness Panel 1
  • FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz
  • FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski
• Witness Panel 2
  • Guy “Bud” Tribble, Apple’s VP for Software Technology
  • Bret Taylor, Facebook CTO
  • Alma Whitten, Google’s Privacy Engineering Lead
  • Jim Harper, Cato Institute
  • Dorothy Atwood, AT&T’s Senior Vice President, Public Policy & Chief Privacy Officer
  • Prof. Joe Turow, University of Pennsylvania

Join me to watch the livecast. I’ll be livetweeting on the #Privacy hashtag.

I summed up most of my thoughts on the online privacy issue in my written testimony to the FTC’s privacy roundtable last fall. Also check out my paper Privacy Polls v. Real-World Trade-Offs, which explains why Prof. Turow’s polls can’t really show us what choices consumers would make if actually presented with the trade-off between locking down on the use of their data and the content and services supported by advertising that relies on that data for its value.

I wrote here a couple of months ago about the shady practice among a few Internet retailers of handing off customers who accept a “special offer” to a company that charges people a monthly fee for some kind of credit monitoring service. And I argued hopefully that maybe technologists and the Internet community could generate a response to this problem:

Being a smart, informed, and aggressive consumer is each person’s responsibility if a free market is to operate well. The alternative is a negative feedback loop in which government authorities protect us, we rely on that protection and stop policing retailers. Thereby we abandon the field of consumer protection to government authorities, who—try as they might—can never do as good a job for us as we can for ourselves.

The Senate Commerce Committee is having a hearing today on “Aggressive Sales Tactics on the Internet and Their Impact on American Consumers.”